By the end of the afternoon the crew of the Lion were totally captivated by the Romanov sisters: they ‘could talk of nothing but the Emperor’s daughters, their beauty, their charm, their gaiety, the unaffected simplicity and ease of their manners’.72 A farewell ball for 700 guests was to be held later that evening on board the Lion and New Zealand specially roped together for the purpose, but much to the visitors’ dismay Alexandra refused to allow her daughters to attend. Meriel Buchanan noticed a look of ‘wistful regret’ on the faces of the British officers as they said goodbye to the four Romanov sisters. The girls, as always, accepted their mother’s decision ‘without demur or argument’, though they had looked a little ‘crestfallen’ and when Olga boarded the imperial launch taking them back to Peterhof ‘she looked back at the big grey ship, and waved her hand to the officers standing to attention on deck’. She smiled, but there were tears in her eyes.73 It was a moment that, decades later, Meriel Buchanan would recall with an intense regret tinged by hindsight: ‘Happy voices, smiling faces, golden memories of a summer afternoon, of a world that could still laugh and talk of war as something far away.’74
* * *
On 15 June (28 NS), news came of the assassination at Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, by a Serbian nationalist. Nicholas made no mention of it in his diary: political assassination of this kind was a fact of everyday life in Russia and the potential significance of the act was made little of at first. Far more important was the family’s imminent holiday among the Finnish skerries in the Shtandart. But it was rather subdued, Alexey having hurt his leg jumping on board and being once more laid up. At the end of the trip Alexandra told Anna Vyrubova that she sensed that the family’s wonderful days in Finland were over and that they ‘would never again be together on the Shtandart’, though they hoped to be back on board in the autumn when they planned to visit Livadia, the doctors having recommended that Alexey and his mother both needed ‘sunshine and a dry climate’.75
The family was back at the Lower Dacha at Peterhof on 7 July in time to greet the French president Raymond Poincaré on a four-day visit. The highlight was a review of the Guards at Krasnoe Selo, led by Nicholas on his favourite white horse, accompanied by all the Russian grand dukes, and with Alexandra and the children in open carriages also drawn by white horses. It would prove to be the last great parade of Russian imperial military glory: two days after the French president left, Austria-Hungary delivered an ultimatum to Serbia and on 15 July (28 NS) it declared war. Historically Russia had a duty to defend the Serbs as fellow Slavs and war now seemed inevitable. In between urgent meetings with ministers Nicholas, who remembered the debacle of the war with Japan and dreaded the prospect of hostilities, exchanged urgent messages with his German cousin Willy. ‘With the aid of God it must be possible for our long-tried friendship to prevent the shedding of blood’, he telegraphed.76 Meanwhile he reluctantly capitulated to his General Staff and sanctioned general mobilization, bringing a 600,000-strong Russian army onto a war footing. This provoked an aggressive response from Germany, now rallying to the support of Austria-Hungary. Final, frantic attempts at diplomatic mediation were made in this ‘time of great anguish’, during which Alexandra sent a desolate telegram to Ernie in Hesse: ‘God help us all and prevent bloodshed.’ She had, of course, also sought Grigory’s wise counsel. He had been horrified at the prospect of war and had repeatedly begged her and Nicholas: ‘the war must be stopped – war must not be declared; it will be the finish of all things.’77
On the evening of 19 July (1 August NS in Europe) Nicholas, Alexandra, Aunt Olga and the children went to church to pray. They had not long returned and were sitting down to dinner when Count Freedericksz arrived with formal notice, handed to him by the German ambassador in St Petersburg: Germany was at war with Russia. ‘On learning the news the Tsarina began to weep,’ recalled Pierre Gilliard, ‘and the Grand Duchesses likewise dissolved into tears on seeing their mother’s distress.’78 ‘Skoty! [Swine!]’ wrote Tatiana of the Germans in her diary that evening.79 The following day, 20 July (2 August NS), was scorching hot. In anticipation of the imminent Russian declaration of war, people crowded the streets of St Petersburg as they had in 1904, parading with icons and singing the national anthem. The news spread like wildfire: ‘women threw jewels into a collection made for Reservists’ families’, reported the correspondent of The Times.80 At 11.30 a.m. about 50,000 people surrounded the British Embassy singing ‘God Save the King’ and ‘Rule Britannia’.81 Church bells rang out constantly, all day long. The whole city was one huge traffic jam of motor cars and droshkies and full of people shouting and singing and waving ‘cheaply printed portraits of the beloved “Little Father”’.82 The shop windows too were full of Nicholas’s portrait ‘and the veneration was so deep that men lifted their hats and women – even well-dressed elegant ladies – made the sign of the cross as they passed it’.83 In the afternoon, Nicholas wearing field marshal’s uniform, and Alexandra and the girls all in white, arrived in the capital in the Aleksandriya. Alexey, who was still recovering from his latest accident, had had to be left behind. From the royal landing stage at the Palace Bridge, the imperial family walked the short distance to the Winter Palace through crowds of people who fell onto their knees shouting hurrahs, singing hymns and calling out blessings to Nicholas.84 ‘Kostroma last year is nothing to this,’ said one eyewitness, ‘they’ll lay down their lives for him.’85
At 3 p.m., after a gun salute had thundered out across the city, some 5,000 court officials, military and members of the aristocracy gathered in the Nicholas Hall of the Winter Palace for a solemn and intensely moving Te Deum, sung in front of the talismanic icon of the Virgin of Kazan. This was the same icon Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov had prayed to in August 1812 before leaving for Smolensk to take on Napoleon, who had just invaded Russia. During the service Nicholas ‘prayed with a holy fervor which gave his pale face a movingly mystical expression’, noted the French ambassador Maurice Paléologue, while Alexandra stood, characteristically tight-lipped, by his side.86 The assembled crowd ‘all looked tremendously tense and alive, as if gathering up their strength to offer it collectively to their ruler’.87 ‘Faces were strained and grave’, recalled Maria Pavlovna. ‘Hands in long white gloves nervously crumpled handkerchiefs and under the large hats fashionable at the time many eyes were red with crying’. After the service, the court chaplain read out the manifesto declaring that Russia was at war with Germany, after which Nicholas raised his right hand in front of the gospel and announced: ‘We will not make peace until the last man and the last horse of the enemy shall have left our soil.’88 Immediately afterwards, ‘quite spontaneously, from some 5,000 throats broke forth the national anthem, which was not less beautiful because the voices choked with emotion. Then cheer upon cheer came, until the walls rang with their echo!’89
The tsar and tsaritsa then processed out. Nicholas’s face was a blank; Alexandra more than ever looked like ‘a Madonna of Sorrows, with tears on her cheeks’ and stooped to console people as she passed; others fell on their knees or tried to grasp at Nicholas and kiss his hand. When he emerged on the balcony overlooking Palace Square, a vast crowd of around 250,000 people who had been patiently waiting ‘quiet, with faces grave and rapt’ knelt down ‘as one’ ‘in mute adoration’.90 Nicholas made the sign of the cross and brought Alexandra forward to greet them, after which he and she retreated inside. But the crowd did not want to let them go: ‘Each time that the sovereigns left the balcony the people clamoured for their reappearance with loud hurrahs and sang God Save the Tsar.’91
The day had been ‘absolutely wonderful’, Tatiana later wrote in her diary, but that evening for once there were no games of dominoes for Nicholas, and no reading aloud to his family.92 Returning to Peterhof at 7.15, they all spent it ‘quietly’.93 The next morning, central St Petersburg seemed like a ghost town. The magnet of everyone’s attention was now the railway stations as column after column of t
roops marched in great lines towards them singing popular Russian folk songs, waving their khaki caps and leaving behind a trail of sobbing women and children.94 On 22 July (4 August NS) Russia’s ally Great Britain declared war on Germany, upon which Nicky received a telegram from the king, his cousin Georgie. They both were fighting ‘for justice and right’, he said, and he hoped ‘this horrible war will soon be over’. In the meantime, ‘God bless and protect you my dear Nicky … Ever your very devoted cousin and friend.’95
In those first heady days of July–August 1914 Russia was gripped by a consuming, almost feudal sense of nationhood that harked back to the old Mother Russia of legend. ‘It seemed as if the Tsar and his people embraced each other strongly, and in this embrace stood before the great Russian land’, declared Novoe vremya in suitably jingoistic terms.96 The declaration of war was a fitting coda to all the ceremonial of the previous year’s Tercentary. ‘We believe unshakeably that all our faithful subjects will rise with unanimity and devotion for the defence of Russian soil’, Nicholas had declared in his manifesto, adding the hope that ‘internal discord will be forgotten in this threatening hour, that the unity of the Tsar with his people will become still more close’.97
The capital might have been gripped by intensely felt patriotism of a kind that every Russian knew from Tolstoy’s War and Peace, but in the countryside most of the peasants were resigned rather than enthusiastic, knowing full well that the burden of the war effort would fall on them, as it had always done. Rasputin was in despair that his warning had gone unheeded and that he had not had the opportunity to persuade Nicholas, in person, against going to war.* The words of a telegram he had sent in the final days before war was declared have, ever since, been seen as prophetic:
There is a terrible storm cloud over Russia: calamity, much grief, no ray of light, an incalculable ocean of tears, and as for blood – what can I say? There are no words, just an indescribable horror. I know they all want war from you, even those who are loyal, but without knowing that the price is destruction … Everything will be drowned in much blood.98
* * *
There remained one final grandiose public act of ceremonial for the Romanov family to perform – in Russia’s historic capital, Moscow, on 5 August. The imperial court and the diplomatic community took the 444-mile (714.5-km) train journey south for what seemed to British ambassador Sir George Buchanan an occasion where ‘the heart of Russia voiced the feelings of the whole nation’.99 At the Kremlin on their way to the Te Deum at the Uspensky Cathedral, the tsar and tsaritsa walked in procession, followed by their daughters. Meriel Buchanan thought they seemed ‘a little subdued and grave, their faces pale’; Olga in particular had had ‘a rapt expression on her face’; Maria had been in tears and Meriel noticed how ‘Anastasia turned to her now and then with a little admonishing word’.100 Much to his parents’ despair, Alexey had once more had to be carried. Now, more than ever, the heir to the Russian throne needed to be perceived as fit and well.
In a speech he made that day, Nicholas emphasized that the conflict embraced all Slavic peoples of the Russian Empire: this war would be nothing less than a defence of Slavdom against the Teutons. Sir George Buchanan was impressed by the power of the religious ceremony inside the Uspensky, which was ‘beautiful and impressive beyond description’:
The long line of archbishops and bishops, in their vestments of gold brocade, their mitres sparkling with precious stones; the frescoes on the walls, with their golden background; the jewelled icons – all lent colour and brilliancy to the picture presented by the glorious old cathedral.
As soon as we had taken our places behind the imperial family the deep bass voice of a priest was heard chanting the opening passages of the liturgy, and then the choir, joining in, flooded the church with harmony as it intoned the psalms and hymns of the Orthodox ritual. As the service was nearing its close the Emperor and Empress, followed by the Grand Duchesses, went the round of the church, kneeling in deep devotion before each of its shrines or kissing some specially sacred icon presented them by the Metropolitan.
As he drove away with Maurice Paléologue, Buchanan ‘could not help wondering how long this national enthusiasm would last, and what would be the feeling of the people for their “Little Father” were the war to be unduly prolonged’.101 A long and costly war of attrition against Germany and Austria-Hungary, as Nicholas well knew, would fan the flames of social unrest in Russia yet more, as it had done during the war with Japan. For Alexandra, distraught and desperately worried for her brother Ernie and his family trapped in a Germany she no longer loved or recognized, the outbreak of war ‘was the end of everything’.102 All that was left now was to beg Grigory to pray with them for peace.
War of course put paid, at a stroke, to all talk of marriage for the two eldest Romanov sisters. Nor would there be any more cruises round the Finnish skerries or holidays in the Crimean sunshine; no more idling away the long sunny days of summer chatting and laughing with their favourite officers from the Shtandart; and no more Sunday afternoon teas with Aunt Olga, for she had volunteered as a nurse and had already headed off on a hospital train to the Russian front at Kiev.
On 1 August Tatiana recorded her aunt’s departure and the usual mundane routine:
The five of us had lunch with Papa and Mama. In the afternoon we went for a walk like yesterday. Went on the swing and got caught in the rain. Had tea with Papa and Mama. We spoke on the phone to N. P. [Nikolay Sablin] and N. N. [Nikolay Rodionov] – to whom I sent my little icon to wear round his neck via N. P. The two of us had supper with Papa and Mama and Grandmother. Xenia and Sandro were there too. Then Kostya [Grand Duke Konstantin Konstaninovich] came to say goodbye as he’s leaving for the war tomorrow with the Izmailovsk Regiment. We came back at 10.30. Papa read.103
The safe, unchallenging, insular world that the Romanov sisters had known until now was about to change dramatically.
Chapter Fourteen
SISTERS OF MERCY
When Russia went to war in the summer of 1914, it was faced with a desperate shortage of nurses. With massive losses of almost 70,000 killed or wounded in the first five days of fighting, the Russian government predicted that at least 10,000 nurses would be needed. Stirred by patriotic duty, legions of the fashionable and aristocratic ladies of St Petersburg – or rather Petrograd, as the city was quickly renamed – as well as the wives and daughters of government officials, and professional women such as teachers and academics, rushed to do medical training and embrace the war effort. By September, with the need for nurses increasingly acute, the Russian Red Cross had reduced the usual year-long training to two months. Many women did not make the grade and with it the right to be called sestry miloserdiya – sisters of mercy – as nurses were termed in Russia.
From the day war broke out the tsaritsa was determined that she and her two eldest daughters should play their part; in early September they began their Red Cross training, taking on the self-effacing titles of Sister Romanova, numbers 1, 2 and 3.1 Although Maria and Anastasia were too young to train they also were to play an active role, as hospital visitors. No one represented the female war effort in Russia more emotively than did the tsaritsa and her daughters through the two and a half long and dispiriting years of war that preceded the revolution of 1917. Everywhere – in newspapers, magazines and shop fronts – one prevailing, iconic image dominated – of the three imperial sisters of mercy soberly dressed in their Red Cross uniforms. Stolitsa i usadba featured them in uniform regularly on its pages, a fact that inspired many other Russian women to follow their example.2 Edith Almedingen remembered a city full of young women burning with ‘war-work fever’ and wearing the ‘short white veil and the scarlet pectoral cross on their white aprons’.3
War galvanized the ailing tsaritsa: ‘Looking after the wounded is my consolation’, she asserted.’4 Within three days of hostilities beginning Alexandra had taken command of the vast national war relief effort, re-establishing the huge supply depots that sh
e had set up in the Winter Palace and elsewhere during the war with Japan. Aside from producing surgical bandages and other essential medical dressings, the depots also gathered and distributed pharmaceutical supplies, ‘non-perishable foodstuffs, sweets, cigarettes, clothing, blankets, boots, miscellaneous gifts and religious items such as tracts, postcards, and icons’, and sent them out to the wounded.5 Soon they were filled with well-heeled society ladies in their plain overalls learning to work sewing machines under the supervision of seamstresses to produce bed linen for the wounded, or sitting for hours on end packing gauze and rolling surgical bandages.6 All the major rooms of the Winter Palace – the concert hall and various other large reception rooms, as well as the imperial theatre and even the throne room – were converted into hospital wards for the wounded, their beautiful parquet floors covered with linoleum to protect them and filled with row upon row of iron beds. Soon, without fuss or fanfare, the tsaritsa and her two eldest daughters were seen not just in Petrograd and Tsarskoe Selo but as far as Moscow, Vitebsk, Novgorod, Odessa, Vinnitsa and elsewhere in the western and southern provinces of the empire, inspecting hospital trains and visiting many of the string of hospitals and depots set up by Alexandra; often they were joined by Maria and Anastasia, and Alexey too, when well. Elsewhere in Petrograd, the sizeable expatriate British community also rallied to the cause, led by ambassador’s wife Georgina, Lady Buchanan who ran the British Colony Hospital for Wounded Russian Soldiers* that opened on 14 September in a wing of the large Pokrovsky Hospital on Vasilevsky Island. Lady Georgina’s daughter Meriel was soon working there as a volunteer nurse.7
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